by Heloise Pinto

Staying in St Andrews through winter means experiencing the full force of the Scottish weather, when the climate is at its most changeable. As students, we all know that it’s more than possible to go a whole day without seeing daylight: from when you start work before sunrise to finishing early (just before 4pm) and stepping outside for the first time into darkness. In fact, the Scottish winter can be so spectacularly cheerless in atmosphere that many international students (used to sunnier climates) find a need for daylight lamps in order to compensate for the change in mood that the extended darkness can cause.

J.M.W. Turner, ‘Tummel Bridge, Perthshire’, 1802-3

Despite this, the winter season in Scotland remains a theatre of atmosphere and colour which has been the subject of exploration by landscape artists for centuries. The season has a distinctive colour palette which we can see carefully described by J.M.W Turner in this oil painting of 1802-3. Because this is a landscape, we do not immediately notice the two figures at work manoeuvring a fallen tree trunk on the rocks in the foreground, or the loosely rendered cluster of figures just below the building around what appears to be a small bonfire. Three more figures hide at the right-hand foot of the bridge, and a solitary one ascends it on the left-hand slope. The artist has perfectly captured the strange effect of the late afternoon sun being briefly exposed by the thick cloud – suggested by the small patch of blue sky at the top right of the composition – which results in an unusual and momentary yellowish illumination of the grey stone, very similar to that of St Andrews, on an otherwise leaden colour spectrum. The ascending direction of the painting reflects the odd thrill of such an intensely bleak atmosphere; the Perthshire bridge points skywards using the only dead straight lines in the natural landscape, while its two arches increase in size from right to left, travelling towards the mountains and directing our eyes the same way. We are invited to climb up the mountain and into the Scottish landscape to explore it for ourselves. Upon first glance this painting looks like a dismal winter scene, of men labouring before an isolated dwelling, but it also articulates the beauty of Scotland at this time of year; it’s true that like everywhere else, warm summer weather improves the scenery of a place, but the artist has acknowledged that Scotland is rare in that the beauty of its landscape actually transcends the atmospheric effects of dark clouds, cold wind and heavy rain which only serve to make it more spectacular.

Rosa Bonheur was a French painter whose interest in animals drove her artistic career to international success and a grand tour of Scotland, and also to a reputation as the “French Landseer.”. She was inspired by a “passion for unspoilt nature” to visit the Highlands, and this painting is an example of her response to the rural winter landscape she encountered there. Her naturalistic but slightly romanticised realism communicates the nobility of the bulls and the agility of the sheep, not only describing the anatomy of the animals but also the effect of their habitat and climate. Moreover, it articulates the force of the Scottish weather that prevails in this scene, and the urgency of the storm against which the shepherds labour. Although the subject of this painting is the livestock in the foreground, the effect of a landscape is achieved by Bonheur’s use of colour for the bulls; they make up a palette of the adjectival tones of earth and terrain typical of the Highlands. The black of the hills in the distance, the chestnut bronze of the ground, the sliver-grey of the rocks and sky and the sandy tan of the road – or ‘raid’. Bonheur has chosen to describe the desolation of this landscape with a lively scene, impressing the understated grandeur of the Highlands upon the viewer by confronting them with the majesty of the central black bull head on. This delivers the same impression of quiet, natural stateliness that also comes across in Landseer’s “The Monarch of the Glen”, and which can be found in all aspects of the Scottish landscape, especially in winter as these artists have seen.

Peter Graham, ‘O’er Moor and Moss’, 1867

Peter Graham uses the same palette to describe this landscape of 1867, only shortly after Bonheur completed her painting. He uses a completely different method, however, of conveying the damp and sodden quality of the earth in winter from Bonheur; she achieved it through the animation of the rain and direction of the clouds as well as the sparkling animal hides. Conversely, Graham has chosen a still moment to observe; the pace of the action is much slower because the only movement is that of the clouds as they travel together with the figure and his horse “o’er moor and moss”. This way, Graham lets the puddle to the right introduce the element of moisture in the landscape while the streaking cloud formations reflect the distribution of water in the ground. The composition is split half and half between land and sky; the sky is necessary to make up the palette because it provides the grey that is missing from the patch of earth he has described. Despite the apparent unfriendliness of the soggy and bleak terrain through which Graham’s figure and horse trudge, he has nonetheless manipulated this same palette to bring a warmth into the scene which makes us want to enter it.

William Johnstone, ‘A Point in Time’, 1929-37

This abstract piece is generally thought to represent a response to the landscape of the artist’s home in the Scottish Borders, where he grew up on a farm and also lived out the last few decades of his life. William Johnstone, one of the first British painters to work towards purely abstract art, has retained the colours recognisable in a natural landscape as well as the sweeping lines of the hills of Selkirk with their rounded and uneven forms. The artist was heavily influenced by modernist ideas throughout his career and was drawn to the abstract as a method of conveying thoughts and feelings that did not relate to physical objects or even people. He also spent time, whilst on a travelling scholarship with the Royal Scottish Academy, in Paris in the late 1920s where he was exposed to Surrealism and its associated ideas about the representation of the unconscious. As such, his abstract work is definitely complex in meaning, but this also allows it to be interpreted more widely. For example, many of this painting’s elements point to its relation to a landscape: the dramatic swathes of dark colour that we have seen elsewhere, the same lack of warmth except for the small patch of bright yellow which has the same effect on atmosphere as the golden-grey stone in Turner’s painting of Tummel Bridge, a similar blue grey of a sombre sky set against the silhouette of the mounds, and green and black shapes cutting into the others like clusters of trees around the borders of the fields. Whichever way you might look at it, this powerful piece was certainly brought about one way or another by the compelling landscape of the artist’s home.

Sir William Gillies, ‘Peeblesshire Landscape’, 1952

The most recent of the landscapes I have chosen is this 1952 piece by Sir William Gillies, called “Peeblesshire Landscape”. It showcases again the same theatrical array of colour that we’ve seen in the other four pictures, this time in yet another style variation. Gillies makes his landscape appear like a patchwork quilt with his distorted grid of fields and unexpected inclusion of blue and red among the fields. This has the effect of lending a warm comforting atmosphere to the landscape – similarly to Graham and Turner – which he manages while not excluding the other familiar, more melancholy tones. This artist was influenced early on in his career by the work of Swiss-born artist Paul Klee and worked, for a while, in a cubist style inspired by his childlike simplicity of form. Although this piece is evidently not an example of Cubist art, that simplicity of Klee’s defines shows through, and the flatness of the planes of colour suggest a similar distortion of spatial perspective and depth. An interesting aspect of this painting is that the composition is almost entirely taken up with the land and not, like Graham’s or Turner’s pieces, for example, with special emphasis on the sky. There is also an absence of figures, buildings or livestock which makes it quite unlike the other paintings I have discussed and has the effect of leaving it in an almost abstract state, composed of simply the colours and shapes you’d see if you let your eyes glaze over while looking at the scene; texture and perspective are secondary to colour and shape, and these, especially the former, give way to the ironic realism of the painting which lets the viewer easily recognise the Scottish landscape through the artist’s stylised lens. It shows that, across the genres and backgrounds of artists through several centuries, the Scottish landscape, particularly in winter, has remained an important influence over those lucky enough to have experienced its beauty.

ST.ART does not own the rights to any images used in this article.